My Night With Gilligan's Father

The tacky side of this remembrance of the one and only Sherwood Schwartz—born in 1916, creator of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch," and gathered to the ultimate Skipper's bosom at age 94 on Tuesday—is that I have to explain right up front that I published a novel called Gilligan's Wake in 2003. As you might guess, it's a bunch of jokes about how "the Professor and Mary-Ann!", along with their cohorts, invaded the imaginations of people my age.

Whether or not we wanted them to, in fact—but never mind. What matters is that it led to the night I got to shake my benefactor's hand. Nobody at all should be surprised that his jokes were better than mine.

The parasitic act of imagination I'd committed is no new game in the novel-writing racket nowadays. Critics were inventing names for it long before my antic drivel joined the party: "appropriation," "recontextualization," like that. Oh, and "meta."

Still, what use would Sherwood Schwartz—the one and only Sherwood Schwartz—have for academic blather? I swear, I could have faced Proust in the afterlife and said, "Marcel, I did my best. Hug me or shoot me, but don't hesitate." But imagining the reaction of the man who created Ginger made me quail.

My first clue that Sherwood Schwartz was not only a TV genius but a wonderful man who did wonderful things more or less for the hell of it was a phone call around a month before Gilligan's Wake came out. "Is this Tom Carson?" the great man said, not waiting for an answer. "This is Sherwood Schwartz." And then he talked for half an hour.

He flattered me some about my book, I think and hope sincerely. But he also wanted to remind me that "Gilligan's Island" wasn't his only claim to immortality. He didn't think he got enough love for "The Brady Bunch."

He was probably right. Yet the sitcoms we make churches of have less to do with the way we were than the age we were, and I'd been too old for "The Brady Bunch." (Ah, what a snot I was by then, reading Nabokov's Ada for the dirty parts. But never mind.) "Gilligan's Island," on the other hand, had helped me map my new environs when I came back to the United States after a dazed Foreign Service childhood in, among other places, West Africa—and so I owe Sherwood Schwartz for teaching me that America is a paradisiacal island from which people are puzzlingly and ineffectually trying to escape.

We don't really know why Dorothy is so hell-bent on getting out of Oz, either. Or Kansoz, to call the U.S.A. by its right name, but never mind. By the time Sherwood Schwartz hung up, I probably looked—and definitely felt—like a sponge some generous-minded soul had mistaken for Drew Brees. I also thought that would be the only time I ever heard from him, but I was wrong.

Before I get to our next encounter, the bit of back-story that needs filling in is that, in the acknowledgments to my book, I had saluted Sherwood Schwartz as "il miglior fabbro"—in English, "the better maker." That too was a joke, and not only because I can't speak Italian. I was echoing T.S. Eliot when he dedicated "The Wasteland" to Ezra Pound—and speaking of wastelands, Sherwood Schwartz had named the good ship Minnow after Newton Minow, the FCC chairman who once called TV a vast one. (Honest, I didn't call the damn thing Gilligan's Wake for nothing. I thought I'd put my heart on my sleeve until people started asking why I had a Rubik's cube sewn to my jacket.)

My publisher had set up an author signing at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, my favorite bookstore when I lived in L.A. Afterward, my wife claimed she'd realized immediately who the serene old gent in the second row must be, but I hadn't even noticed him. Vanity and nerves had me so swaddled in their smog that I couldn't have told Abraham Lincoln from Charles Manson.

So I read a bit from Gilligan's Wake, and then came question time. This is always a tense moment, because nobody knows what to ask about a book they haven't read. Sometimes you just shuffle off after a non-pregnant silence, but this one was about to give birth. Now visible to me—and suddenly peculiar in an audience of two dozen or so people, because he was neither friend nor relative and yet looked right at home—the serene old gent in the second row wanted to ask me something.

"In your book, you call me il miglior fabbro," he said cheerfully. "And I want to know whether I've been insulted or flattered." He beamed at me.

Stepping forward in slo-mo, I put out my hand. "Mr. Schwartz?" I croaked.

And no: I didn't add, "I presume." But it was my equivalent of the meeting of Stanley and Livingstone anyway, and you'd better believe I knew which of us was Stanley. In a flash, I realized I'd voyaged all the way from Africa just to shake hands with il miglior fabbro.

"Tell everybody else what's going on," a chum of mine out called by way of reminding me that we were in public. So I cleared my throat: "This is Sherwood Schwartz," I explained more loudly. "This is the creator of "Gilligan's Island."

As that sank in, the people who'd come to hear me read—or thought they had, at any rate—turned into primitive cave children, hushed by an auk's egg among them that had just begun to glow. Sherwood Schwartz! Whether they hummed "Sit right down and you'll hear a tale" or "Here's the story of a lovely lady" in the shower, my former audience was in the presence of a man who'd done as much to mold our minds as God did to mold Adam and Eve. As St. Ignatius Loyola used to say, "Give me a child at age five and he will be mine for life."

I knew he didn't need an answer to his question about il miglior fabbro. That had just been Sherwood Schwartz's fairy-tale way of announcing he was in my midst, so to speak. But it was a dandy excuse to compliment him by explaining the whole "The better maker"/T.S. Eliot/"The Wasteland" vs. Minow's "a vast wasteland" bit to the group as he sat surrounded by blissful and awed stares. The truth is, I might as well have been doing voice-over narration so far as everybody's eyes were concerned—everybody's but his, that is. Those went right on twinkling at me.

Once I quit talking, the next question came. Of course it was addressed to Sherwood Schwartz. "Did you read the book?" someone wanted to know.

"I read the first chapter. And this young man"—I was 44, but he was 86—"is. . ." [He said something so nice about my writing that repeating it would be insufferable boasting.] "Then my son stole it from me," Sherwood Schwartz went on, as a cheerful fellow about my age in the seat next to his grinned. "But I'm going to get another one tonight and finish it."

If only to prolong their stay in Sherwood Schwartz's presence, other people did start thinking of stuff to ask me then. And bless 'em, since I wanted to stay in Sherwood Schwartz's presence, too. But it didn't do a lot for my poise that the first question was about the propriety of borrowing my seven narrators from the sitcom he'd created.

Normally, I had that answer down pat. It was a good one, too: There were precedents for pastiches like mine, and so on. But I had never given it in the presence of Sherwood Schwartz, and I floundered along about parody and the Fair Use Doctrine and rhubarb and hamena-hamena. No slouch at punching up a script, the man himself rescued me.

"Would it help if I mention I'm not litigious?" Sherwood Schwartz barked, cutting me off in mid-flounder as everyone laughed. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I laughed the hardest, mostly from relief.

He kept on doing that, too. Whatever I got asked about—and I can't even remember what the questions were—Sherwood Schwartz took it for granted that he could chime in at will, pretty much by royal right.

If you think that annoyed me, guess again: I was delighted. (So, of course, were our listeners.) Not only did he have a royal right, but I was half of a comedy duo with Sherwood Schwartz—and you know, screw my novel. Opportunities like that don't come along every day.

In I forget what context, I praised him for being so "benign." He came back immediately with, "Of course I'm benign! I'm even be-ten." It was so exactly the kind of dumb pun Gilligan's Wake is stuffed with that I wondered for a mad moment if he and I might be related via more than cathode rays.

Then the Skylight Books manager had the idea that all the store's copies of my novel should be signed by not only me but Sherwood Schwartz, something he happily agreed to do. I'd love to tell you that we passed 'em back and forth like plenipotentiaries inking a treaty, but I'd already taken care of my share of the chore back when I thought my name would be the only one inscribed. So Sherwood Schwartz sat down alone at the table with pen in hand and signed copy after copy. If any copies of Gilligan's Wake ever end up being worth a packet, those will be the ones.

"Something like that could only happen in Los Angeles," I marveled to a friend a few days later. "I don't know what the New York equivalent would be, but if something like Sherwood Schwartz showing up had happened there, it wouldn't have had the same, I don't know. Generosity, good humor, shared amusement, whatever. I'd have been getting put in my place, not being given a benediction." My pal grew up in New York and knows the literary life. "You're right about that," he said.

Because it was the most charmed night of my life, I didn't mind ending up as an observer at my own reading one bit. However accidentally, I felt like I'd been responsible for provoking something nice—namely, a reunion between Sherwood Schwartz and a lucky few of his 40 or 50 million children. But his real son must have noticed that I didn't seem to have much to do, because he came over with a confiding look.

"I want to tell you something. You know how, in your book, the 'Gilligan's Island' " characters are all 20th-century archetypes and metaphors who stand for the whole country?" he asked.

And all right, so maybe I was feeling a little eager for praise. Swelling up on the spot with authorial ego, I waited to hear how brilliant my meta version had been. Hear it from Sherwood Schwartz's own son, no less.

Not a chance. Fondly and proudly, he nodded at his father: "That's how he saw them from the start," he said.

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